Common Lisp

To: rpg at SU-AI, griss at UTAH-20

Subject: Common Lisp

From: HEDRICK at RUTGERS (Mngr DEC-20's/Dir LCSR Comp Facility)

Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1981 22:06:00 -0000

I just had a conversation with JonL which I found to be somewhat
unsettling. I had hoped that Common Lisp was a sign that the Maclisp
community was willing to start doing a common development effort. It
begins to look like this is not the case. It sounds to me like the most
we can hope for is a bunch of Lisps that will behave quite differently,
have completely different user facilities, but will have a common subset
of language facilities which will allow knowlegable users to write
transportable code, if they are careful. I.e. it looks a lot like the
old Standard Lisp effort, wherein you tried to tweak existing
implementations to support the Standard Lisp primitives. I thought more
or less everyone agreed that hadn't worked so well, which is why the new
efforts at Utah to do something really transportable. I thought
everybody agreed that these days the way you did a Lisp was to write
some small kernel in an implementation language, and then have a lot of
Lisp code, and that the Lisp code would be shared.
Supposing that we and DEC do agree to proceed with Common Lisp, would
you be interested in starting a Common Lisp sub-conspiracy, i.e. a group
of people interested in a shared Common Lisp implementation? While we
are going to have support from DEC, that support is going to be $70K
(including University overhead) which is going to be a drop in the
bucket if we have to do a whole system, rather than just a VM and some
tweaking.
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